Certainly, the early work has a freshness. It may be less over-thought and less overwrought. But looking back at this early work, I realize that it is all very familiar. Those first couple years, I looked at the work of famous artists and I produced similar work. While it's never easy to make good art, it's a lot easier to copy what someone else invents than to invent something yourself.
Let's take, for example, this bicycle sculpture that I made within the first couple weeks of my first quarter. You have to love this. But in some ways, by the time I was assembling it, it was doomed to read as cliché. In fact, I recently stumbled across what could be the prototype in a Sanford & Son episode, pictured below.
I enjoyed making my bicycle sculpture, and I'm sure part of the game was demonstrating that I was up to the task of making expressive art. I think I demonstrate a remarkable control over the materials I was working with. But I don't believe I ever seriously thought of it as anything other than an exercise. As soon as I was finished making it I was ready to move on and get into something more personally meaningful.
The first series that felt like my own was a series of photographs made using flashlights. I'll write more about this series in another post. I began the series in high school as part of a senior project and I continued working on it my first year at Tri-C in Bruce's Life Drawing course.
The class met on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, and each Thursday, from eleven to noon, we had Creative Hour. During this last hour of the class, I worked on the series that would be featured at the Annual Student Art Show at the end of the year. This series began my lifelong interest in melding realistic proportions of the figure with a rustic, sign- or symbol-like simplification. Even still, the point of departure was a popular trick that I learned from a Photography magazine. My early work tended to be tinged with a "neato" factor in the process. These little gimmicks matured into a lifelong interest in alternative methods. Like other early works, this series began with me proving I could mimic existing art, but I refined it in my own inventive ways.
My interest in sculpture can be seen in this early ceramic piece that I made in high school. This, also, attracted the attention of my graduate advisers. But what we have here is a rebellious coil pot. My high school art classes were not particularly creative. When directed to make a coil pot in art class, I liberated the coils from the mundane spiral and gave them some poetic freedom. There is a little of me in this but, again, no direction. I like it, but it's transitional.
This plaster piece was made by simply shoving a vacuum cleaner hose into a mop bucket and filling the bucket with plaster. I spray painted it and was done. It is simple, elegant, sophisticated, remarkably mature, but it hasn't a whole lot to do with the themes that really interest me. I like it, but I had to keep moving.
This piece derives from several sources. The first was Bruce's own interest in minimalism and shaped canvases. The second is Josef Alber's experiments with colors. And the third is the use of color to evoke depth, which we were studying in class. I also wanted to find out if I could push the depth a little by raising the red rectangle just slightly above the blue. You can't tell, but it may enhance the illusion. I don't know. Bruce told me to be bold, not subtle. This was one of my first experiences in which an instructor challenged my method. Again, this piece was about mimicking other artists and an exercise in applying the principles I was learning. It was also one of my first attempts to see how the artist's intent and the audience response might relate. But the piece has little to do with my style. Looking back, I think it accomplishes what I wanted it to do, but it's obviously very dated looking.
This painting is another that caught the attention of my graduate advisers. Why? Because it's big? Because it looks like a Lee Krasner painting? This painting was a joke that my brother-in-law and I played with a huge, abandoned canvas that had been in the storage room for ages. We dumped every kind of leftover medium we could find on it. We made a mess on the floor, jimmied the lock to the janitor's closet, got a mob and bucket to clean up, spilled the mop bucket all over the hall floor, made Mike laugh and got a light lecture from Bruce when we hung it on the wall wet and the President of the College leaned up against it. It took forever to dry. Again, not my direction. Not my work. We said, let's see if we can make an Abstract Expressionist painting, we did it, and we moved on. Experiment completed. Obviously we used our talent and skill. And it's not bad, at all. But it obviously lacks the control of color, in particular, that one finds in a more serious piece. It really was just us having fun, and maybe showing off.
I played a lot, early on. But I was always interested in bringing something new to the world—something all my own. So, while I proved my capabilities and my understanding of art history, I was always driven to develop my own style. This is what I've been trying to do for the last twenty-seven years. As I gain control over the resources and discipline I need to regularly produce finished work, and as I find ways to secure the time that I need to create, I expect that I will accomplish that goal. I will do my own thing, drawing on tradition and the influences of other artists, but making it my own.
All the preceding art works date from 1985 to 1987.
